New climate disinformation und demagoguery by the AAAS! E.g. the headline of this news article contradicts the mentioned research!
The article heavily relies on climate model forecasts up to 2050! Laughable! Junk journalism!
Does this article/research confuse urban sprawl with rural areas? Quite possibly!
What is please "urban climate change"? Microclimate? How relevant is that compared to global warming/climate change? Or is this an admission that greenhouse gases are a red herring (junk science)? You bet!
This research also relies on junk climate models and forecasts of up to 100 years. Climate is a much too complex a phenomenon that is still poorly understood. Weather forecasts are still barely accurate for more than 48 hours or so and so on.
Does not the urban heat island effect already mess up the temperature measurement record for over 100 years or so given expanding urban areas and population growth? You bet! The urban heat island effect is perhaps the strongest reason why Global Warming is a hoax! Many of the systematic temperature measurements have been taken at meteorological stations in urban areas for the past 100 or more years..
Resolution of climate models is not a convincing metric!
"... But now a pioneering study [???] suggests that as global warming continues in much of the world, the countryside’s appeal as a climate buffer may dwindle. ...
But such regional models inherit the biases of the coarse global models and don’t capture feedback effects of cities on the broader climate. They have offered varying forecasts for the urban heat island effect: Some suggested it will stay the same, others saw it growing stronger, and still others forecast it would weaken. For the past few years, 20 modeling centers worldwide have been collaborating, hoping to converge on a verdict.
Taking advantage of increasing computing power, other researchers are pursuing global climate models that can simulate the whole planet at resolutions high enough to capture cities. As part of the European Union’s Destination Earth project to forecast the planet’s future, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) has developed a high-resolution climate model. Researchers there used it to simulate a greenhouse-warmed world from 2020 to ’50 at a 9-kilometer resolution, fine enough to track urban climate.
The ECMWF team zoomed in on 200 cities in four climatic regions: cold, arid, temperate, and tropical. The results, published in June in Geophysical Research Letters, led to a surprising conclusion:
By 2050, whereas cities on average remained hotter than the countryside nearby, “the rural surroundings of cities warmed up faster,” says Xabier Pedruzo-Bagazgoitia, the study’s lead author. Except in cold regions, the urban heat island effect was weakening. ...
Fifteen years ago, a modeling study in the Journal of Climate had suggested a plausible mechanism for a weakened heat island effect [???]. ..."
From the abstract:
"Coupled multi-decadal global km-scale simulations completed in recent years open new perspectives in the investigation and understanding of urban climate change [???].
This study introduces a generic method for extracting urban areas and their rural references worldwide and validates it on hourly timescales with remote-sensing observations of land-surface temperature for over 400 cities, while identifying the key role of spatial resolution.
We showcase the immense amount of hourly data available for each city for 60 years of past and future climate [???] in the Next Generation Earth Modelling Systems simulations, and how these simulations represent surface-atmosphere interactions driven by urban areas.
We finally propose city clustering as a method to exploit these simulations and move beyond city-specific results. Results suggest a mean potential decrease in future urban heat island intensity driven by stronger rural warming for all clusters except for cold climates."
